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Fellow passengers rescue woman who fell on tracks at Kendall station

A Minnesota visitor who fell on the Red Line tracks at Kendall Square last night was helped out by other passengers, the MBTA reports. According to an MBTA Transit Police report on the incident, shortly before 7 p.m.:

[The woman's husband] stated they were talking with some friends on the inbound platform and [she] was walking backward. He stated that she continued to walk backward into the pit and fell into it. He then jumped into the pit to help get her out and other passengers assisted in lifting her onto the platform. [She] reported injury to the neck, hips, and dizziness.

If you watch the video carefully, she does not walk backward into the pit as her husband states. She walks backward toward the pit, turns to her right, take two steps forward, walking parallel to the pit, then steps off the edge; all while staring at what appears to be a cell phone.

I do hope she is OK, but I hope more so that neither the T, nor the city faces a lawsuit over another case of someone not paying attention to where they are going.

If you watch the video, she was actually walking forward when she fell off. She had backed away from the fare gates while talking to someone. She even turned to her right (camera left) and started forward a step or two before her right foot didn't land on the platform and she went off sideways to her right.

This was a case of ignoring the bright yellow tactile-bumped surface while distracted with a phone, drink, and conversation all at once while walking next to a 5 foot deep pit.

I'm sorry if I appear to be politically incorrect, but what is it with these morons who keep falling onto the tracks at T stations in recent years? It has become a regular occurance. Remember that other woman at Kendall a few months ago who simply stepped on air and fell in with her child? I'm sorry, but it has nothing to do with being a tourist, with being from Minnesota, with being "unfamiliar" with our T system. If you are on a narrow platform and there is a huge pit with an electrified rail in it, AVOID THE PIT. It's truly as simple as that. There is nothing fundamentally unsafe about the structure of the Kendall (or other) T stations that invites falling into the pit, narrow platform or otherwise. Unless you actually slip on something like ice, a banana peel or other slippery substance, you really have to be in another world to fall in.

Probably not any real increase in falls, but now we have pics (both surveillance & personal) that help make this a real story. Before the internet, someone fell in and a couple of people helped him/her out and then told their friends. Now, the witnesses plaster the pic all over Facebook and blogs and Twitter and it ends up on places like here.

Assumed her tourist group were walking 6 abreast and dawdling and someone with someplace to go nudged past. Oops.
Harsh, maybe. But I've been a tourist and I know I'm not clueless like some I see. Pick up the pace, you're in a damn city.

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